Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Print on Demand with CreateSpace

I just got a email from CreateSpace notifying me that they did away with the Pro Plan. Looking over their site it looks like they decided to operate more like Lulu then the weird byzantine setup they had before. They have a cheaper base price and more format sizes than lulu but offer a different set of royalty rates that you will have to review. For $25 per book you can get expanded distribution which has the best royalty option of anything I seen for PoD although I think it requires the use of an ISBN for the book.

Also unlike Lulu it appears their method of selling online is to have the author create a estore and customize it's appearance. Doesn't look much more difficult than setting up with Cafe Press. That setup offers the best royalty option outside of paying for Extended Distribution.

Bat in the Attic Games

How to make a Sandbox

The Old School Renaissance

To me the Old School Renaissance is not about playing a particular set of rules in a particular way, the dungeon crawl. It is about going back to the roots of our hobby and seeing what we could do differently. What avenues were not explored because of the commercial and personal interests of the game designers of the time.

What are RPGs?

A game where the players play individual characters interacting with a setting with their actions adjudicated by a human referee.

Rules are an aide to help the referee adjudicate actions and to help the players interact with the setting.

Dice are used to inject uncertainty which make a tabletop RPG campaign more interesting than "Let's Pretend".

The only thing a player needs to do to roleplay a character is to act if he or she was really there in the setting in that situation.